Double Exposure

March 15, 2019
Gough and Millar, who have worked on such television series as Smallville and Into the Badlands, have crafted a tense and intriguing spy novel set during the turbulent early 1960s amid a growing threat from the Soviet Union. Korean War vet David Toland now works as the director of preservation for the Library of Congress' National Film Archive. He's pulled into espionage when CIA agent Lana Welles gives him a deteriorating film that was smuggled over the Berlin Wall and is thought to contain classified information. Suddenly Toland finds himself a long way from restoring classic American movies, as he and Welles are pursued by a group of adversaries determined to keep the film's secrets from being revealed. Although this is a first novel, it reads like the work of genre veterans, with Gough and Millar using the storytelling skills they acquired from screenwriting to good advantage. This old-school Cold War thriller makes the most of its film-preservation frame and will appeal to the le Carr� crowd as well as to movie lovers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)